core dump management

[Rad Rioveros]

Hi gurus,

I'd like to check with you some questions about linux core dump:

- One of my servers panic-ed. When I brought it up, there was no core dump generated. How will I check my server if the server has enabled the core dump generation? or is it enabled by default?

- how will i enable core dump?

- what are the command in linux core dump management?

if you could point me to a documentation of this sysad topic, that would be great!

Thanks in advance!

~rad

[Stuart Browne]

Panic's don't generate a 'core' dump. A process with generate one if it has a failure that's caught (and you've not turned core dump's off).

The reason why no sort of core is dumped upon a panic is that a panic could be with the IO drivers, so how could it dump anything if it doesn't trust the driver to write data?

Newer RedHat's have a crash-dump utility (similar to some of the commercial unix's) which can dump some information (to the swap partition I believe), but I've not had a system panic on me which is using this.

http://lkcd.sourceforge.net/

for more info..